G. Leitner, M. Hitz, and A. Holzinger (Eds.): USAB 2010, LNCS 6389, pp. 82–100, 2010. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010 A Small but Significant Difference – The Role of Gender on Acceptance of Medical Assistive Technologies Wiktoria Wilkowska, Sylvia Gaul, and Martina Ziefle RWTH Aachen University Communication Science, Human Technology Centre (HumTec), Theaterplatz 14, 52056 Aachen, Germany {Wilkowska,Gaul,Ziefle}@humtec.rwth-aachen.de Abstract. The current research aimed to study user diversity with a focus on gender differences in adoption of medical assistive technologies in general, and in particular. In order to understand the gender impact, we conducted two con- secutive studies and considered gender as a key moderator of acceptance as- pects in the medical context. The first study focused on general aspects of medical technology acceptability: users’ willingness to use it, the importance of privacy and trust as well as the general attitude across gender and specified age groups. For a deeper insight into this topic the second study was conducted in order to analyze gendered acceptance on specific health-related device. As re- sults showed people’s general attitude towards medical technology and their willingness to use such medical assisting devices is throughout positive. How- ever, gender differences emerge at the time when it comes to an assessment of a concrete medical tool (here smart textiles). Keywords: Gender, smart home technology, privacy, trust, control, perceived usefulness, TAM, medical technology, smart textiles. 1 Introduction Adoption of medical assistive devices is an important topic when facing the profound demographic changes in many countries of the world and the considerable bottlenecks arising from the fact that increasingly fewer people are present which may take over the nursing and decreasing supply shortfalls of societal health insurance funds [1]. As several studies in the last years have shown, technology acceptance is a crucial factor for a successful rollout of medical technologies, like for instance electronic health systems (ehealth), smart health, ambient assisted living (AAL), or personal health care systems [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. Although in the past decades there is growing aca- demic research and societal interest in understanding factors that determine accep- tance in this sensitive context of medical assistive devices for elderly people, there is still a great demand for further researches and deeper insights. In this paper two studies are presented focusing on two points that have not been really considered in the recent literature on acceptance of medical assistive technol- ogy yet – especially in their combination – namely age and gender. Before presenting